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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 371 015 3 



HoUinger Corp. 



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BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 

Serial No. 474; General Series No. 310 



EXTENSION DIVISION 



OF 



The University of Wisconsin 



General Information and Welfare 



THE RURAL AWAKENING 

I]Sr ITS RELATION TO 

Civic and Social Center Development 



Address delivered before The First National Confer- 
ence on Civic and Social Center Development, at Madi- 
son, Wis., October 37, 1911, by Herbert Quick, Editor of 
Farm and Fireside. ''' 



PRICE, 5 CENTS 



MADISON 

Published by the University 

January, 1912 



Entered as second class matter, June 10, 1898, at the post-office at Madison, 
Wisconsin, under the Act of July 16, 1894. 



UNIVERSITY EXTENSION DIVISION 



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[2] 



^\)t Wini\}tv^itp of Wi&ton^in 

UNIVERSITY EXTENSION DIVISION 

Department of General Information and Welfare 



Madison, Wis. 
OFFICERS OF ADMINISTKATIOIS 



Charles Richard Van Hise, Ph. D., LL. D. 

President of the University 

Louis E. Reber, M. S., Sc. D. 
Dean, University Extension Division 

Edward J. Ward, M. A. 
Adviser, Bureau of Civic and Social Center Developments 



THE RURAL AWAKENING 

A'ddress delivered bg Herbert Quick, Editor of Farm and Fire- 
before the First National Conference on Civic and Social 
Center Development, at Madison, \Vis., October ;27, 1911. 



The manner in which the ordinar^^ farmer, or the ordi- 
nary farmer's wife will be impressed by the fact that there 
has been gathered together here in Madison, Wisconsin, a 
movement for the making" of schoolhouses social centers,, 
where there may be free and untrammeied debate of pub- 
lic qtiestions — which I take it is the prime aim of the So- 
cial Center movement — and recreational and cultural gath- 
erings and meetings on social lines, must be of interest to 
those present. 

Traditional Use of tlie Country Sciiooiiiouse 

In my experience in the West, where they have faced 
the problem of the public demand for the use of the 
schoolhouse, such use has not been shut off bj^ any reluc- 
tance on the part of the officials to give the schoolhouse 

[3] 



for the use of tlie people. The trouble has l)OL'n, in the 
main, that tliere has been a lessenino- and lesseiiino-, o-rad- 
ually, ot" the demand for the sclioolliouse on the part of 
tlie peoi^le. Tliat is the trouble. Wlienever we have any 
question to be debated out in tlie counti'v, there is no dif- 
iiculty in getting the use of tlie schoolhouse. Such school - 
house occupancy is an established fact, and a recognized 
right in agricultural politics in most of the rural districts. 
The use of the schoolhouse is flagging for the want of an 
audience, not by reason of any exclusion. 

In my boyhood, in the middle West, the schoolhouse 
was the social center, in so far as we had any. When any 
denomination, (^atholic or Protestant, chose to hold serv- 
ices, the schoolhouse was given for them. The old-fash- 
ioned "Literary" — we left everything off but the adjective 
— one in every township where old and young got together 
for the purpose of reading papers and for debates; the 
.-spelling bee — all these were held in the schoolhouse. But 
:1;hey seem to have gone. The country literary societj^ 
imeets in the same manner as a club in the city, in an ab- 
isolutely private way and usually' in a private house. 

Reasons for Decline of Use of Rural Schoolhouse 
as Social Center 

"What is the cause of the abandonment of the country 
ischoolhouse as a social center? There are a number of 
reasons. First, the railroad has run over it. It has 
brought the little country village into almost every neigh- 
borhood or in reach of it. Here has been built the little 
•opera house, the lodge room, the public hall, where people 
may go for such functions as are held there. 

The building of churches in the country, as it has been 
extended, has brought to bear upon the schoolhouse as a 
social center an influence which has robbed the school- 
house of the best people, and <>f meetings of a religious 

[4] 



nature. The church has been in a large measure the 
cause of the decadence of the schoolhouse as a social 
center. 

The invention and adoption of modern schoolhouse 
equipment is a physical reason for the abandonment of 
the schoolhouse; that bench that ran around the sides of 
the room, which as we teach, and have been taught, was 
unhygienic and of a cruel character, and those old-fash- 
ioned desks built of boards, were required by the fact 
that in those days young people went to school longer 
than they do now. It was no uncommon thing to find 
there pupils of twent}^ and twenty-one years. Now youL 
scarcely ever see them there and the schoolhouse has been 
re -equipped with benches that will not permit of older 
people using them. The country schoolhouse of today i& 
physically unfit for the use of grown people for evening*^ 
gatherings. 

I have held meetings in country schoolhouses to which 
I think most of the audience would have refused to come^ 
and justly so, if they had known how they were to be tor- 
tured, not alone by the speaker, but by the physical condi- 
tions under which they listened to him. 

Influence of the City upon Rural Communities 

These reasons for the abandonment of the schoolhouse 
as a social center are no more influential than is the effect 
of the city upon the country. This has been almost fatal 
to any widespread interest in neighborhood work in many 
communities. The people who might be leaders in coun- 
try life are in a state of expectancy. They do not reckon 
upon being in the countr^^ all their lives. They expect tO' 
become able to go to town to live. 

Rural life has in many ways suffered from the tremen- 
dous suck of the city upon country population. The fact 
is coming to be recognized th^^t while poor people have- 

. [51 



"been driven too-etlier by myriads in the citj-, forminji- the 
city slum, we have at the other end of tlie social machine 
what has been spoken of as the country slum, where con- 
ditions are as bad as, if not worse tliaii, in the city. One 
phase of tlie magnet's action is the crow<l of steel tilings 
at the pole. This is the slum. The other phase is seen 
in the disi)ersed atoms outside the field of force, and this 
is the unmag-netized population of the rural districts. 

Landlordism is a parab'zing- intluence on country life. 
American landlordism is more cruel and less mitig'ated by 
idealism than tlie landlordism of England and Ireland; it 
tends to make ihe farmer inefficient. The community in 
which a large portion of the men are tenants, — farmers 
holding farms under a tenure running not over five years — 
cannot possess a foundation for any strong, big, powerful 
country life. 

Betterment of Rural Conditions Must Come 
Through School 

The rural church is not performing, as a rule, the func- 
tion it ought to discharge as a social force in rural life. 
Here and there you find a man taking hold of an aban- 
donded rural church and turning it into a real agency for 
rural uplift — a splendid example of the rural church. 
Once in awhile Ave find the Y. M. C. A. doing splendid 
work in the country in the way of building up social life, 
and, similarly, the Y. W. C. A.; but on the whole, I am 
coming to believe that the great awakening of country life 
of which I believe we of this organization are going to 
be a part, must come through the schoolhouse and through 
the use of the schoolhouse as an agency- for reawakening. 

Of course you who are here are familiar with the be- 
ginnings of this reawakening in rural life. Life in the 
country is showing signs of renewed activity and virility. 
We find it in what is called the new country or rural 

|6J 



school; and the procBsding-s of this Social Center Confer- 
ence will be watched with interest bj^ the extension work- 
ers of the agricultural colleges, and those county superin- 
tendents who are making over that old and sometimes 
even despised office into an agency for mighty influence 
on rural life. This Social Center Conference should help 
in the work of transforming the country schoolhouse into 
a torch, lighting the way to better times. 

It is a fact that we are going to have a new rural life. 
Rural life is going to be awakened. We are going to 
have a revolution in country life. The very prairie has 
taken tire with the new idea and wherever there is an 
opportunity for fellowship, a chance to do good social 
work, wherever the delights of cooperation are once felt, 
this movement will work out a way to a rural life in 
the United States that will inaugurate a neighborhood 
delight in countrj^ living, such as has not been seen in 
America, or in full measure anj^where yet; but of which 
we once had a portion which has gradually lessened year 
by year, since the time when our pioneers came to the 
new countr^r and finding all things nnformed, built up 
neighborhood life that for a time was worth more than 
anything of the sort we have possessed since. 

Relating Rural Schools to Country Life 

I happen to know of a case out in Iowa where the social 
center movement has been started by a woman who did 
,not know what her own power would be when she began. 
:She is a county superintendent of schools. She found on 
taking office one hundred and twenty-five little one-room 
schoolhouses in all stages of good repair, of dilapidation, 
and of disrepair. She told me that when she went about 
visiting the schools, the children would hide behind the 
buildings and peer around corners at her as if she had 
been some sort of strange animal — thej^ were embarrassed 
— they had had no social life. 

[7] 



Tliese cliiUlreii were, many of them, the children of 
hermits; for th(> farm life of the United States is to a very 
larjyfe extent the life of a race of hermits. She told me 
that the first thing she did to these schools was to clean 
them ph.vsieally, remove the ontward disfigurements, and 
get acquainted with the children. The teachers were in- 
efficient. Thej^ had been conducting these country schools- 
as the average teacher in the United States has been con- 
ducting them for generations — ^a bad copy of a poor and 
ineffective city school. Tliey had little relation to coun- 
try life. Tlie readers in which thev read had been com- 
piled by p?ople in whom there was no such a thing as- 
rural si)irit. The histories, from which they studied the 
movements of our nation, were written by men who knew 
little or nothing about the history of the agricultural life 
of the country. Their arithmetics had been compiled by- 
people who made up problems in banking and discount, 
and knew nothing about the per cent of plant food needed 
in the soil to make the corn grow, or how much butter fat 
should be in the cow's milk, or of the problems of e^g 
production. Their physical geographies, which dealt to- 
some extent with the earth and its composition, contained 
very little in the way of discussion of the soil. They 
simply presented the things of interest to the people of the- 
towns and cities. They had very little of nature study, 
and what they had was about such animals as the marmot 
and the auk, or Huxley's three-toed horse — there was 
nothing closer to the farm life than the muskrat, in fact 
the entire course of study had been made up by people 
from the city and for the children of the cities. 

These rural pupils were taught by people from the city 
high schools, to a great extent, people who knew nothing- 
whatever of the life for which they were in-e paring the 
children under their care. The result was, as it always 
has been, that the country boys were given ambitions to 

[8] 



loe lawyers — and ultimately to land in the presidency of 
the United States, — or to be standard oil mag-nates; and 
the girls wanted to be wives of captains of industry. With 
these ambitions imparted in the rural schools, and under 
these conditions generally, one has no reasons to be sur- 
prised at the fact that country life for the past fifty years 
has been one long period of decay. It will be cured over 
the whole nation just as in this region of Iowa it is being 
■cured through the schools. 

This woman told nle that after five years, she still has 
left a large percentage of the original corps of teachers — 
two-thirds. They are now efficient. They have found 
out what was needed and are supplying it. They are so 
in love with the work that many of them refuse to con- 
sider offer of larger salaries in city schools. 

The Re-constructed Country School 

The new schoolhouses built there are equal to the scliool- 
houses of the towns, with teachers quite as efficient, who 
are making a successful effort to correlate the work of the 
public schools with countr3^ life. I saw boys sitting in 
their seats in countrj^ schoolhouses with racks of agri 
tural college bulletins by their sides. They were actually 
writing on such things as raspberry culture and potatoes, 
and were checking up their work in school by the work on 
the farm. They were taking from the school to the farm 
value received from the agricultural bulletins. 

I spoke at their farmers' institute. I talked one night 
to 1500 people, the vast majority of them farmers who 
had come into this little town for the purpose of attending 
this farmers' institute. It was held in a rather small 
armory. The lower part of the armory had been arranged 
for drill purposes, and now given over to the use of an 
•exhibit of the rural school work of that county. There 
were aprons hemmed by the pupils in the rural schools, 

[9] 



bultiT. pill's of cookies, bread and cake, and tliere were 
farm tools, and models of the ideal country school, raffia 
work; everything: that could possibly be done bj'^ the little 
boys and girls of the country schools and almost every- 
thing- related to farm life. In the inception of the move- 
ment the country children thought tliey could not compete 
with the town schools, and the town schools sort of looked 
down on the children of the country schools. But now. 
the rural schools feel a rather uppish superiority ov^er the 
town schools. Tiiej^ feel that their knowledge is of more 
value, more practical." This is the result of only five 
years of individual work upon the country schools of one 
county. 

A Rational Rural Program 

One boy became interested in this work of corn grow- 
ing and stock judging. He took prizes. His mother and 
sisters were there at the institute as well dressed as Siuy 
women on the grounds. The family had been redeemed 
from poverty and worthlessness by this new kind of rural 
school. The boy who was writing on agriculture — the 
raspberry essayist — had been one of the hard eases three 
or four years before. He had been headed straight for 
the gutter. Now he had become a good boy — all through 
seeing the fine things in rural life pointed out to him by a 
sane rural curriculum. 

Here is the rural awakening that the social center con- 
ference must get in line to help. The whole problem of 
country life needs j'-our help; Ave need social center work 
in the country where the best brains of the land are; we 
need schoolhouses made for the discussion of all public 
and political questions. We must have a new kind of coun- 
try schoolhouse. We have just reached the point where 
we are readj^ to abandon the old schoolhouse of one room 
and build something better. It must be built so as to 

[lOJ 



aninister to the things needed and demanded by an awak- 
-ened rural life. 

The Rural School as Neighborhood Laboratory 

The slogan of the farmer must be "cooperation." The 
farmers must sell cooperatively, they must buy coopera- 
tively. The new schoolhouse should be a place made to 
hold gatherings for the discussion of these matters, places 
where people may put their feet under the same table and 
talk to each other. The country schoolhouse should be a 
place where things can be done collectively that cannot be 
•done individually. All the work in the country school 
should be for the education of the neighborhood. The 
school should be a laboratory for the farms of the neigh- 
borhood. The individual testing of the milk of cows for 
butter fat should be carried on in the country school- 
houses, and is so carried on in some of the iDlaces I have 
named. 

In one place at which they began testing in the country 
school the milk from the neighborhood cows, a certain 
farmer who was against all these new-fangled things at 
first, (and you know we always find that kind of people) 
soon found by the school tests that he had been keeping 
cows which he thought were good, that were not actually 
paying their board and that on other cows he had made 
his money. He became a friend of the new-fangled no- 
tions. 

The Rural School as Neighborhood Economic 

Center 

The country school must ultimately become the count- 
ing room in which the neighborhood farm accounts are 
kept. The books of the farm must be kept cooperatively 
or they cannot be kept at all — the right kind of books. 
And when the agricultural colleges have worked out a 
system of accounts which will be more or less practical 

[11] 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 371 015 3 



ami accurate as a cost system for farms, the best pupils of 
the country school of the future Avill Avork out in school 
tlie economic problems of that nei<i"hborlioo(l. I think in 
time to come, the schoolhouse will not only be the social 
center of the neighborhood, but it will be the economic 
center, and the long- sleep of rural life will be absolutely 
and definitely at an end. 



L12I 



